June Brown, the beloved actress who played Dot Cotton in EastEnders, asked her former co-star Lord Michael Cashman for help in securing an assisted death, he has revealed. The peer shared this detail during a House of Lords debate on assisted dying, as the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill fell on Friday afternoon.
Ms Brown, who famously portrayed the chain-smoking launderette worker in the long-running BBC soap, made the plea to Lord Cashman before her death in 2022. Lord Cashman starred alongside Ms Brown during his spell on the show in the late 1980s. Notably, Ms Brown's character, Dot Cotton, was central to a major euthanasia storyline in 2000, assisting fellow Albert Square resident Ethel Skinner in her final moments after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Lord Cashman himself made television history in 1989, when his character Colin Russell was part of the first on-screen gay kiss on British TV.
Lord Cashman said: “I also remember my dear friend June Brown, who implored me to get her to a country where she could die with dignity and the death that she wanted.”
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill fell on Friday, as peers ran out of time to discuss it. It will not become law unless MPs pick it back up in the House of Commons and propose it again.
The former Labour peer, who is now non-aligned, had previously spoken in the House of Lords about seeing a friend suffer who had asked him about an assisted death, but did not identify them.
He had said: “When my dear friend of many, many years suffered for months, she knew there was another way and she implored me to help her, my lords, I did.
“I was prepared to break the law as I contacted clinics in the Netherlands and Switzerland. However, it was to come to nothing.”
Lord Cashman has previously spoken of how Ms Brown had helped him get time off Eastenders rehearsals to attend protests against Section 28 in the late 1980s.
On Friday Lord Cashman said he had also watched his husband of 31 years die a “slow and agonising death” more than a decade ago.
“I deeply regret, my Lords, that we have not passed this necessary and I believe important Bill, we have not fulfilled the humane wishes of those who seek the right to choose how they die,” he said.
